A student was chatting with me last Tuesday afternoon about DSLRs. Basically, he was interested in getting into digital photography, and was asking my opinion on a Nikon D60 setup. We got into quite a discussion, and one issue I made a big point on was shooting in RAW mode.
One of the most amazing things about RAW shooting is being able to retrieve an immense amount of detail that is lost when shooting in JPG. Here’re two pictures to show what I mean. The below pair is from our trip to Phang Nga Bay several weeks ago. My Nikon D300 had been set to shoot in RAW + JPG. The picture on the top is in JPG without further image manipulation, and the one below was manipulated from the RAW file. The two files in their original sizes are here too.
The amount of midtone and shadow detail one can retrieve is just mind-blowing. Neither image has been sharpened, and adjustments for the second image were done very quickly. Basically I used Photoshop to reduce overall exposure, ramped up clarity, slightly increased color saturation, made adjustments to highlights, darks and shadows under the parametric tone curve, and lastly some very minor adjustments to blues saturation and luminance channels.
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